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For our final full day we couldn’t really decide what to do and in the end we plumped for returning to the Île de Ré to do a bit more exploring. When we’d been earlier in the week we literally drove to the western end, walked around the lighthouse, and then drove home again. There are a few other bits that are worth doing.
So we drove over to Saint-Martin-de-Ré to see what we could find.
We found a lovely little town with a nice pedestrianised central area (where we had some lunch) and a little harbour surrounded by some old fortress walls. The place has quite a lot of history, apparently, including a siege in 1627 in which a bunch of English troops surrounded some rebel French ones in the hope of relieving some of the pressure on the royalist French troops who were kind of stuck in a siege in La Rochelle. It’s all very complicated.
Also just outside Saint-Martin-de-Ré is a bigger fortress area that was converted to a prison at some point.
So we had a good day of walking around, taking photos and taking breaks for food, drinks and ice cream. It was a good way to spend our last day before having to spend another whole Saturday negotiating French motorways.